Stitching Snow (8 page)

It hit empty air.

Before I could process how he’d dodged me like that, he got a grip on one arm, twisting it behind my back. I swung my free arm. Nothing. A thrust elbow, a kick, twisting and struggling . . .

even more nothing.

He shoved me against the wall. One arm pressed against the back of my neck while the other pinned my hands, and he must have sprung extra limbs, because my legs were pinned as well.

A perfect hold. Can’t slip it, completely helpless . . .

My panic attack fueled a renewed struggle, but Dane still held me in place. I felt his breath on my ear and shuddered.

“I’m not one of the half-drunk miners you’re used to fi ghting . . . Princess.”

He knew.

63

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

I couldn’t breathe.

“I’m the ‘treasure’ you were looking for,” I whispered.

“The treasure I
got
, the way I see it.”
Get out
now
, Essie.

I dug for the old instincts that had let me body-hop to Moray before, focusing on the physical contact between us, willing myself to see through Dane’s eyes, to see if I could fi nd some way out of this.

I hit an invisible wall, bouncing back to myself. A new spike of pain drilled through my skull.

Dane’s breath caught brieflly, but his grip didn’t loosen. When he spoke again, his voice was just as hard as before. “Not bad, but it won’t work on me unless I let it.” That could only mean one thing. This trouble was even bigger than I’d thought.

Dane wasn’t a Garamite at all.

He was an Exile.

64

7

EVEN IF DANE HADN’T

been pinning me, I couldn’t have

moved. The part of my brain that ran my body had disengaged entirely. The part controlling my voice was a touch more stubborn.

“What in blazes do you want with me?”

“The truth, for starters.”

“Truth? You’re a lying mass of worm dung, and you want to talk about the truth?”

“You assumed I was a Garamite because my ship is,” he said.

“I gave you a story that fi t with your assumption.”

“What about your name? Dane isn’t an Exile name, so who are you really?”

He pressed me harder against the wall. I was starting to lose feeling in my hands. “None of your business. You’re going to tell me why you’re able to Transition.”

“You’re dimmer than Dimwit, aren’t you? Everyone has two parents, and I obviously didn’t get it from my father.” S T I T C H I N G S N O W

“Matthias’s fi rst wife . . . Alaina?”

“My mother, yes.
She
was an Exile, only my father didn’t know it.”

Dane fi nally released me and stepped away. I rubbed and fll exed my hands, getting the blood fll owing back to them. I knew better than to try to go at him again. He was far too skilled a fi ghter. Maybe I still had a chance to talk my way out of the situation, though.

Maybe.

“I didn’t know that,” he admitted. “Why did she do it, breaking the law, hiding what she was? Just to become queen?” No, I wasn’t giving him that much. “Go to her grave and ask her yourself.”

“Maybe I will. We’re on our way there now.” Ice shot through the fi re in my veins. Windsong. Home.

No. I couldn’t go back.

“Why?” I forced out of my frozen lips.

His eyes ran over me from head to toe and back, forcing me to fold my arms tightly or risk trying to punch him again. “You’re the king’s only child. His efforts to fi nd you have failed, so I think he’ll fi nd you a fair exchange for the Candaran prisoners.” A trade. He was going to trade me back to my father for the release of Exiles—Candarans, as they called themselves—like I traded mining shares for data processors and spare circuit boards. The fi re surged back a little, but the buzzing vibration in the deck distracted me.

“I’d say I’d rather die, but you’ve already taken care of that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The shuttle! It might as well be patched together with slug 66

R.C. ll E WI S

spit. Enough to get to Garam, but Windsong is on the far side of the system right now. We’ll never make it.” Dane moved toward the door. “A shame that I have more confi dence in your repairs than you do. Dimwit, no more helping Essie. She needs to stay here, understood?”

“Dimwit Essie stay Essie.”

I glared at the glorifi ed scrap-heap. “You little traitor!”

“Dane Essie friend Essie.”

“How do you even know that word?”

“You’re very skilled, Essie,” Dane said. “But you’re not the only one who knows a thing or two about programming.” After everything—lying to me, knocking me out, kidnapping me—it was tampering with my drone that set my fury burning out of control.

“You rotten, festering smear of snail-scum!” I launched myself at him—surely pure rage was enough to overcome his training—but I was too slow. He got through the door and closed it before I could reach him. My momentum carried me right into the solid metal, smacking my shoulder and knee.

I pounded my fi sts against the door. When that failed to satisfy me, I punched it until my knuckles bled, screaming every obscenity I knew. Pain was a problem for people who had something left to lose.

Dane had to hear me. My voice would carry through the ventilation system if nothing else.

Ventilation . . . the oxygen cyclers. The patch I’d stitched would last eight days, maybe a bit more, but nowhere near the time it would take to get to Windsong. If I’d had access to better 67

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

materials I wouldn’t have used a fuse that would burn out so quickly. But on Thanda, junk-tech was all I had to work with.

Saying I’d rather die than go back home was one thing.

Actually dying of suffocation in the cold vacuum of space was another.

I stopped screaming. I stopped punching. I put one of the large crates between myself and the door, sank to the ground, and hugged my knees to my chest.

If Dane came back in, he wouldn’t see me cry.

When the footsteps returned, I didn’t move, but I did make sure my eyes were dry. I’d lost track of time, but it had to have been hours. All the time spent crying had served just one purpose. It brought me to a decision: I didn’t want to die. Not in the middle of space, at least. I hadn’t survived eight years on my own just to let a brainless boy get me killed. If I controlled myself around Dane instead of trying to dismantle him, maybe I could get him to believe me.

Maybe I could stall him, trick him . . . do
something
to buy myself a chance to get away.

“There you are,” he said, coming around to the back of the crate and dropping meal- and water-packs into my lap. When I glared up at him, he took something from his pocket. My little water-scanner. It turned green when he ran it.

“See? Safe.” He glanced at the dried blood on my knuckles but didn’t comment. “Eat. You’re not worth anything if you starve to death.”

I agreed that starving wouldn’t do me any good, so I silently 68

R.C. ll E WI S

opened the pack and started eating. If I looked at him too much, I feared my resolve to not kill him would fail.

He lingered a moment before walking back to the door.

I waited until he was nearly out of the compartment before speaking.

“I mean it. The ship won’t last.”

“It will. I’m getting you to Windsong, and I’m getting the prisoners back.”

His voice had no give, no room for doubt. People so driven and committed wouldn’t listen to reason. I’d have to get creative.

Good thing creative was my specialty.

I spent hours at a time in my head. The compartment that made up my prison had a small lavatory attached, and Dane brought food twice a day. A stack of my clothes lay in a corner, and Dimwit oh-so-helpfully informed me that it had retrieved them from my shack under Dane’s orders. I didn’t need anything else, just time to think. Sometimes I sat on the crates, sometimes I paced, but always I thought and calculated and planned.

This was just another puzzle for me to solve.

My gear and supplies weren’t anywhere in the compartment.

Even the small multitool I kept in a hidden pocket of my jacket was missing.

Dane must have searched me while I was unconscious. It took twenty minutes to calm the revived homicidal rage when I realized that.

Focus, Essie.

Dimwit had been told not to help me, and I didn’t have the 69

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

equipment to access its programming matrix to override that order, but it was useful in other ways. I asked it for the date and time, and it told me. Assuming we’d left Thanda shortly after I’d been knocked out, assuming we were on a direct course to Windsong at the shuttle’s maximum speed . . . That was a lot of assuming, but it gave me an idea of our position.

We had to get onto a planet. Once we had an atmosphere around us instead of a vacuum, I’d have more options. Any logical course to Windsong would take us right by Garam before skimming past the sun. . . .

The sun. I defi nitely had
not
patched the radiation shields well enough to handle the onslaught that came with a solar near-pass.

I had a single plan with any chance of working, and it wasn’t a great chance. If my calculations were right, though, I only had a small window to try, and no time to come up with anything better.

In rummaging through the storage crates, I’d found a sturdy metal brace with a thin edge . . . thin enough to pry the cover plate off an electrical junction on one side of the room.

“Dimwit Dane help Dane.”

“Shh!” The drone had all but ignored me for ages, but it must have recognized I was up to something. “Dimwit, your new directive is to help Dane. I get it. If I don’t do this, Dane and I will
both
be killed. The ship won’t hold together all the way to Windsong. Do you understand?”

“Essie right way Essie.”

A vote of confi dence if I’d ever heard one. Dane had under-estimated Dimwit’s tricky logic algorithms.

Behind the cover plate, I found far too many conduits, and 70

R.C. ll E WI S

I didn’t have anything I needed. I needed Ticktock to tell me exactly which conduit went to what. Even Cusser would’ve been helpful, but at best it was still powered down in the engine compartment. I hadn’t bothered downloading the full schematics to Dimwit. All I wanted to do was send an overload to the oxygen cyclers and force the fuse to burn out a little early.

A precision job with imprecise gear.

Better than sitting here doing nothing.

I wrapped my hand with a thin piece of rubber sheeting, took my best guess at which conduits would do the job, and used the metal brace to cross-connect them.

Sparks exploded out of the junction and the shuttle lurched, throwing me against one of the crates before righting itself. An alarm blared and lights fll ashed as the deck continued to heave and shudder under my feet.

I’d defi nitely damaged more than the fuse in the oxygen cycler.

The door to the compartment was open. Either an emergency measure or I’d shorted it out, too. I didn’t really care which. I dove through the opening, out into the corridor, and staggered up to the command compartment.

Dane sat at the main console, madly working to get the shuttle back under control. Through the viewer, I saw my timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The tan globe of Garam hovered just off to one side. My aim, however, was several sniffs shy. Flashing lights on the console told me the oxygen cyclers were fi ne. The stabilizers and thrusters
weren’t
so fi ne, and right when Garam’s gravity well had a hold on us.

“You did this, didn’t you?” Dane shouted over the alarm.

“Of course I did! Set it down on Garam or we’ll both die.” 71

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

“With the thrusters misfi ring like this? We’ll never make it.” I glanced at the readout on his panel. He was right. I’d sabotaged myself right into a corner and had about fi ve minutes to get both of us out of it.

“Where’s my gear?”

He shot a glare over his shoulder. “How bent do you think I am?”

“Dane, I did this because I don’t want to die!
Where is my
gear?
”

One more pause, one more violent lurch of the misfi ring thrusters, and he gave in.

“Engine compartment, storage cabinet.” I was already halfway there. “And tell Dimwit to help me!

Cusser, emergency protocol. Wake up.” My gear was in its case, right where he’d said, but working on systems midfl ight was not something I had a baby’s fi rst gasp about. Unlike when I’d done the other repairs, the entire ship had power running and parts moving. Every attempt could get me burned, electrocuted, or worse. Doing nothing, however, had more certain consequences.

Cusser powered up and swore. “Shuttle trajectory inconsistent. Danger to human occupants. Correction necessary, and blazing soon.”

“No kidding,” I muttered. Midfl ight repairs were an even worse idea for the drones. Metal-on-metal contact in a live electrical system was a bad combination. I’d have to do it myself, but Cusser could help. “Pull up the shuttle schematics, tie into the monitoring systems, and tell me what to do.” I stitched faster than ever, rerouting power and cross-connecting hardlines, ignoring the burns when sparks fll ew 72

R.C. ll E WI S

at my fi ngertips and the cuts when the ship bucked just as I reached my hand between components. Cusser rattled off a steady stream of instructions, and Dimwit handed me gear before the words were halfway from my mouth. It didn’t wander off once.

The stitches weren’t elegant and neat. They were fast and sloppy . . . and temporary. They only had to hold long enough.

I jammed the last connector in place. The shuttle settled to a rumbling vibration. Not perfect, but better. Steady enough that I could get back to the command compartment. Garam loomed before me, much larger already.

“Will it hold?” Dane asked.

“We’ll fi nd out soon enough.”

He glanced back at me and started. I followed his eyes. My hands and forearms were a bloody, burnt mess. They shook, and I couldn’t stop them. My cheek stung. Another burn.